


Ashes

by duckfresco



Category: Captive Prince - C. S. Pacat
Genre: (this is not shippy), APFA: Abandoned People Forming Alliances, Abuse, Gen, Internalized Misogyny, Jokaste makes some questionable moral decisions but I'd still die for her, Mentions of Rape, Misogyny, Nicaise (Captive Prince) Lives, Nicaise is my Own Son, Post-KR, Unreliable Narrator, canon typical disrespect for sex workers/slight ableist language/existence of slavery, discussions of pedophilia, things start out rough but they're gonna turn out Okay
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-04
Updated: 2018-06-04
Packaged: 2019-05-18 07:49:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,205
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14848671
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/duckfresco/pseuds/duckfresco
Summary: Jokaste has fled Akielos; she finds Nicaise, alive, at a tacky inn in Patras, and takes him under her wing.





	Ashes

 

 _Ashes_ : scattered at funerals, symbolize death and provide soil for rich regrowth. In Greek myth, the Melai Nymphs of the manna-ash tree raised Zeus and were the mothers of humankind. In 19th century floriography, which was greatly influenced by Louise Cortambert’s _Le Langage des Fleurs_ and B. Delachênaye’s _Abécédaire de Flore,_ ash symbolizes grandeur and protection.

* * *

* * *

When she saw him, she recognized him, but she was the only one that did. That was good. It had saved his life.

Without the paint, or the jewels, or the swaths of silk too sheer for a child to be wearing, he looked both older and younger all at once. Older, because you could see the tension around his eyes, the tiredness, and because he no longer looked like he was playing dress-up in a grown-up relative’s clothing. Younger, because without makeup he was fresh-faced, and there was an innocence to scrubbed skin.  
  
Jokaste could have told him to leave off the paint. But he liked the ostentatiousness of it, she knew; he liked to feel different from other people. _Above_ them. It was something they shared, though her tastes had the refined elegance of a woman, not a child.

(Damen would have been horrified at the concept of her helping him retain his position. It was a horror, but making a lofty moral stand would do the boy no favors. Damen had never understood that most people in power broke their toys when they tired of them.)  
  
(Even in the slave baths, Damen had not known what it was to submit in order to survive.)

He recognized her, too. When she stepped in the door of the inn his face grew pale. He dropped his ladle.  
  
Jokaste smiled at him. Warmly, because he was smart enough to be frightened by it. She strolled over to the counter and collected a bowl, holding it out to him in a delicate grip that showed her slender arm to good effect. “I thought,” she said sweetly, “there would be food.”  
  
The ladle lay on the floor between them. Hidden by the counter, true, but the difference that made was negligible. Nicaise flushed. In order to serve her, he would have to bend down and get it, and then wash it in the tub that Jokaste could see behind him, all with her watching him.

“Where’s the brat,” said Nicaise. A hiss. He was smart; he knew what to aim for. It was a pity, for him, that Jokaste had learned to conceal a landed hit.  
  
(They had taken him, her child, her son, her _son_ —)

Jokaste said, “I am waiting for him to serve me dinner.” She tilted the bowl the barest noticeable fraction. It drew attention to the fine bones in her wrist. The roughs in the tavern, already drooling for her, could not have appreciated the subtlety of the motion—had likely not even noticed she had made it— but Nicaise’s eyes glittered. 

_What’s the difference between a woman and a whore?_ A nobleman had asked his friend once, in Jokaste’s hearing. _That’s easy. One of them exists to suck your cock. The other one’s the whore._

(It had been two centuries since there had been a Queen Exalted of Akielos. When she had been a young girl, and as naïve as she had thought herself wise, Jokaste had pinned a portrait of Queen Kydippe to her wall and told her, _you will not be the last.)_

(When she had been a young girl.)

“Boy!” The shout came from the kitchen behind Nicaise. He turned swifter than Jokaste had ever seen him do so, when the Regent of Vere had taken him on the short, clandestine visit to Ios that felt so long ago.Theomedes had still been alive. Kastor had taken Jokaste to the meeting because Nicaise had been there; a pet for a pet. It had been demeaning, but the information too valuable to pass up.

Nicaise took the blow the red-faced man gave him across the face without making a sound. Jokaste smoothed down the front of her skirt to conceal her flinch. She met the rheumy eyes of the man—then innkeeper, probably, from the stained apron stretched over his potlike stomach—and raised a single cool eyebrow.  
  
“Sorry you had to see that, ma’am,” the innkeeper said. Surprisingly, he sounded like he meant it. Jokaste waited, the picture of delicate patience, and tried not to let the appellation perturb her. She had expected _miss._ The changes that childbirth had wrought in her body were inconvenient.

“I can forgive it,” said Jokaste. Accompanied by a glance around the walls, and the barest sniff, she was a noblewoman who had settled for a rustic wayside hovel; with a smile, tight but indulgent, she was making the best of it. A generous noblewoman, who would not bring the matter to her lord. As long as she was offered, from here out, the finest choice of hospitality.   
  
The innkeeper did not know the danger in her pleasant tone, and relaxed even as he bowed, tugging Nicaise down beside him. “Lady. My deepest apologies, again. I’ll have the boy prepare the best room for you.”

“That would be well,” said Jokaste. She used the weakness of relief to allow a hint of road-weariness to color the words, as if she were not used to hard travel (she hadn’t been, until this past month). Hers was not a ruse that would retain credibility for much longer. Though Jokaste washed herself and her gown in every stream she came across, both were showing signs of wear. For now, however, it would pass. The innkeeper’s spine straightened under the shred of gratitude. She had him. “My belongings are outside, with the horses. My men will spend the night with them the stable. They don’t like to be disturbed.”  
  
There were no men, and only one horse, an aged mare with grey-spotted withers that she had charmed from a miller in the first town she had come across. Damianos might not have followed her, might even have stood the loss of a warhorse, foolishly bighearted as he was, but a lone woman _and_ a highbred destrier would have been too much temptation to flaunt on the open road.As Jokaste had been hoping, the innkeeper shoved Nicaise towards the door with a sharp order to bring the Lady’s men food and wine, and see to her luggage. Nicaise would already have known that her presence here, alone, meant that she was out of favor. It was unpleasant, that he knew, but better he than anyone else in the inn. There was no fear that Nicaise would have her up against the wall of the stable with a hand over her mouth, the way these men would if they sensed they could get away with it.

 

“You’re a bit young to be the house boy,” Jokaste said later that evening, when Nicaise, sulking, delivered a sloppily-arranged tray of breads and cheeses to her room. The best the inn offered boasted the unparalleled luxury of a lumpy mattress and a window that was two handspands wide instead of one. Jokaste thought of the feathersoft cushions she had known in the palace, the whole wall open over the white-tipped waves of the sea, and chose to sit in the rickety chair before the fire. She adjusted her seat, daintily, and struck.“Still.”

Nicaise had a blemish on the end of his nose. It turned purple when the rest of his face turned red. “Did Kastor throw you out after you dropped his bastard, or before? Oh wait. I forgot. He’s a bastard too.”

Calmly, Jokaste took a sip of the water she had poured into the cup from the nightstand. She had known, when when she had stopped taking the herbs to prevent pregnancy before visiting Kastor’s bed, that her child would be born a bastard. Nicaise, used to the Veretian abhorrence of illegitimacy and only a child, had miscalculated the size of that blow. It was more of a gentle tap, really.  
  
(It hurt, that she had not a name to call her son by. In Akielos the prerogative of naming went to the father. To allow Kastor to name her son would have been to confirm him that, the father, and Jokaste would have lost the leverage that she had paid for in the ravage of her own body.)  
  
(Her breasts no longer swelled with milk. It had been too long since she had had a babe to put to them.)

Jokaste looked at Nicaise, in his ill-fitting, coarse-woven Patran tunic, his eye puffy with the forming bruise. At fourteen, Jokaste had dismissed a chambermaid for a loose thread in the weave of her least-favorite gown. At fourteen, Jokaste had been a virgin.  
  
“You could pass, almost, for my younger brother,” she said.  
  
“I don’t need you,” said Nicaise. “I don’t need anyone.”

  
Jokaste snuck out of the inn early the next morning, before the pre-dawn light, because of course she had no coin to pay. It was easier than the first time she had done it, if no less humiliating. Of guilt she felt nothing. She did not like innkeepers who hit young boys.  
  
Nicaise was waiting for her, her mare already saddled (badly, like Jokaste’s first attempts), holding the reins of another horse that must have belonged to one of the tavern roughs from last night. “They’ll chase the horse,” she said.  
  
“I’m not walking,” Nicaise sneered.

“Aren’t you?” Jokaste inquired politely. 

There was a basket in Nicaise’s hand, with a long strap for carrying. The mare lipped at it curiously when he drew it over his head, and Nicaise shoved her nose away with the impatience of having done it many times before. 

Jokaste had wondered what he had done with the food he had brought to her “men.” She smiled.

* * *

 “Where are we going?” Nicaise asked, on the third day. Jokaste was surprised it had taken him that long. She supposed he might have been in shock.  
  
“The Patran court,” said Jokaste, because it served her better to have Nicaise think he had time to prepare. The boy’s face fell; he tried to rescue it, and failed. “Did you think I came all the way here to turn around and leave? We’re staying in Patras, for a while.”

“Patras,” Nicaise said, and spat. 

Patras, where they had sent her son, a clause at the bottom of a treaty to keep the other side from poisoning your dinner wine. Jokaste had always intended him to be a piece in the game.

_Please, gods-that-were,_ thought Jokaste, _let him not have been killed as well._

(Only fools worshipped the gods, anymore. They were stuff of legends and songs; they did not stoop to help these newer mortals. Jokaste’s mother had been a priestess, in a temple that was derelict as all temples were nowadays. She had died praying. It hadn’t saved her.)

* * *

 They crossed a peddler going the opposite direction, an old woman, and shared a meal with her for the protection of the long knife thrust through her belt. She had snow-white whiskers and called Nicaise _young man,_ clearly thinking it a compliment. When she was gone Jokaste held Nicaise’s hair back while he vomited.

“He used to compare me,” Nicaise said, glassy-eyed in the aftermath. “He used to point to the other pets and say, look how old they are. How ugly. Not like you. He used to say—“  
  
“Stop,” said Jokaste. In another moment she would be retching as well, and they could not afford to lose two portions of their meager food supply.

“He loves me,” Nicaise said. His forehead was damp with sweat. “No one’s ever loved you.”

_One man did,_ thought Jokaste, _and I betrayed him._ “Is that why he killed you?” she asked.  
  
“I made a mistake. He was angry. I can apologize. I can make it up to him.”

“Damianos and your Veretian Prince will have had him executed by now,” said Jokaste. Until she said it, she had not realized that it was true. “Kastor will be imprisoned, if not dead himself. There is no place for either of us in Akielos or Vere.”

“That’s not true!” His limbs were trembling, fragile bones butting up against each other under his skin. He was very thin. “You’re an old hag and you don’t know anything. It’s your barbarian slave king that’s dead. It’s Laurent—“ his voice sputtered and went out. For a moment, it seemed he would start crying.

Saying the name aloud had undone him. If Jokaste were a kind woman, she would open her arms and allow Nicaise to protest he didn’t need coddling while he folded against her chest. Jokaste was not a kind woman. 

“I wonder who it was, the child he killed to pretend they were you,” she mused. “Well. _Had_ killed. He doesn’t get his hands dirty, does he? Not in daylight. Whoever it was must have borne a passing resemblance. Prince Laurent was convinced.”

( _He’s a child,_ said Damen’s shocked voice in her mind. _He doesn’t deserve cruelty like this._ )  
  
( _Oh, Damianos. Neither did you, and yet the chains came down on your proud-lion head anyway. Wouldn’t it have been better to be prepared?)_

“The only reason they didn’t kill you too is that you don’t matter anymore,” said Nicaise. It was a flailing blow, from a boy who had already been beaten, but Jokaste felt her chest collapse around it. She remembered Damen, when he had come to Karthas, the steel in his eyes that had not been there before. She remembered him delegating her to his under-soldiers, like an afterthought. She remembered the Veretian Prince’s hair…more than that, his mind, matching point-for-point with her in the dungeon. She remembered again her cushions and her sea-view. The Queen’s apartments would be Laurent’s, now, for what little time he spent in them. If Jokaste was right, and they had won, then Laurent now had two kingdoms where Jokaste had never truly had one. And Damen.  
  
She had never truly had Damen either, Jokaste was learning. That was the trouble with playing both sides. You forgot that the love of an honest man cost everything.

(What of the love of an honest woman? _That’s easy,_ said the nobleman, in Jokaste’s head. _There is no such thing._ )

(Once upon a time, Jokaste had kissed Lykaios on her full rich mouth and thought, _there is a sweetness here that even I cannot bear to corrupt._ For days after even persimmons had tasted of dust.)

Damen would have killed her if Laurent had not set her free.

A mocking laugh, hysterical, shattered her memory. Nicaise. Hatred was a spear, pointed and bloody, and Nicaise was at the end of it.

( _Which end?_ asked Damen.)

( _Shut up,_ said Jokaste.)

They stood in the grass on the side of the road, a body’s length apart. Jokaste had staggered back from him. Nicaise, the contents of his stomach on the ground before him, was pathetic in victory.

“He _loves_ me,” Nicaise repeated. A whimper. A plea.  
  
Jokaste thought, _the man who did this has had control of my son._

(Battlefields were not the only place where kings extracted their toll of flesh.) 

* * *

 Jokaste’s feet were a ruin. She had to preserve the mare, to carry her laughably meager possessions and to be ready to bolt if Jokaste needed to flee quickly. The fine sandals she had worn at court were useless on the dirt and rocks. Every night, whether they found an inn or camped outside, she tore strips from the undyed cotton she had stolen for her menstrual cycle and bandaged her feet anew.

She had been jealous of Nicaise’s covered boots until she looked closely one night and saw that all of his toenails were blackened, and not a few of them falling off. Pets, she recalled, like slaves, did not wear shoes.

When Jokaste put Nicaise up on the horse the next morning, for once he didn’t gloat. He did name the the mare **“** Old Grey Akielon Bitch,” but it was more to keep his hand in than anything else. 

* * *

 Whenever it was possible they spent the night at an inn, sneaking out again before daybreak.In a mining town deep in a series of foothills that never quite became mountains, they were crowded to a corner of the taproom by a boisterous group of traveling players who drank enough to topple a wild boar and incessantly tuned their instruments. Jokaste did not appreciate being jostled cheek-by-jowl with a large man and his rice drum, the coarse stone wall scraping at her other side. At least he had not been the lutist, who had leered and made leading comments about her cleavage before Nicaise had jabbed him in a sensitive area with his soup spoon.

As the night wore on and the players showed no signs of retiring, the call went up for entertainment. Obligingly—they knew a chance for advertisement when they saw one—the players cleared a central table to act as a stage and performed a series of capers and bawdies that had everyone but Jokaste and Nicaise howling. During the third round of a song featuring an improbably tiny green kerchief, Nicaise tried to throw his bowl at them. Jokaste stopped him just in time.

At last, when it was so late Jokaste was drawing up mental contingencies in case they didn’t have time to make their escape, the worst of the rabble and their audience stumbled out to drink or fuck or collapse in a heap until morning. A pair of women remained—sisters from their faces, perhaps even twins, dark-haired and pretty—one of them plucking idly at a curiously shaped wooden harp she held propped with one end in her lap and the other on a stool in front of her. The other woman glanced around the emptied-out taproom and smiled when she saw Jokaste and Nicaise.   
  
“What would you like?” she asked. She was wearing ropes of beads in her hair and down the front of her dress; all colors, blue and red and yellow and the rest.

“To sleep,” said Jokaste. She knew she sounded weary. She was. Nicaise shifted, his wooden stool creaking. He had been startled by her sincerity.

“I can help with that,” said the woman. Briefly, she consulted with her sister, who gathered the aimless notes she had been playing into a tune. She sang, like a soft wind:

_My childhood_  
_Was a beaten copper bracelet that I wore around my wrist, it was_  
_My mother’s. My mother_  
_Had a beaten silver cup into which she poured her wine, the wine_  
_Was summer. The summer_  
_Was a woven rose-gold chain that I gifted to my true love_  
_When I held her heart in mine._

Her voice was low and had been trained by somebody who knew what they were doing. Jokaste closed her eyes and tilted her head back against the wall. After a moment she felt Nicaise slump forward, resting his head on the surface of the table. After two moments he was asleep; his breath stirred the hair on Jokaste’s arm. She wondered if her own son would trust her as much, when she saw him, or if he would shy away from the touch of a stranger.

* * *

 They arrived at Bazal in the height of summer, which was cooler than summer in Ios but far more dry. Jokaste’s skin had reddened, flaked, and reddened again under the unrelenting sun, and her mouth was perpetually parched. Nicaise was no better. Before they could present themselves (to the younger Prince, most likely, lesser sons being somewhat of Jokaste’s specialty), they would have to make those selves present _able_.

The bathhouse was very kind to a young Akielon noblewoman who had suffered her clothes stolen while she took a dip in a stream to cool off in the _terrible_ heat. Her young cousin, who hadheroically chased after the thieves but hadn’t been able to catch them (wasn’t it a pity he hadn’t gained his man’s height or strength yet, he hadn’t had a chance), was equally welcome. 

“Your breasts are saggy,” said Nicaise.

“You’re getting another pimple on your chin,” said Jokaste.

 

When they petitioned an audience before Prince Torveld (Jokaste had met him, briefly, on a state visit; Nicaise must have also, on a different one), they were washed, brushed, and dressed in gifted clothes equally foreign to them both. The high collar and full-length sleeves of the Patran dress were stifling, the hairstyle uninspired and severe. It made Jokaste’s nose look big. Nicaise, with his Veretian heritage, was more comfortable in his tunic and pants, but ruined the effect by glowering at the floor as if it had done him a personal wrong.

They had been on the road so long that the number of slaves was startling. In Patras, slaves did not go naked, but they were easily identifiable by their subservience and their tasteful docility. Jokaste had become used to having to do things for herself; to have a fingerbowl of water appear before her, unobtrusively held, was unsettling. It was less than she had been used to in Ios, Jokaste reminded herself. Rinsing her hands was a strangely self-conscious act. As was sipping the wine, provided likewise, and nibbling on the pieces of cut fruit.

Prince Torveld was himself speaking to a slave when they were let into his audience hall, their heads close together, postures intimate. The herald who announced them looked exasperated but not surprised. He cleared his throat.  
  
“The Lady Jokaste,” he said, “and the boy Nicaise.”  
  
It had been long since Jokaste had heard herself referred to like that, all together, both _Lady_ and _Jokaste._ She breathed out, slow, and felt it settle around her. For a moment she was almost home.

(Foolishness. Her home had died when she had ordered the slave collar locked around Damen’s neck, and now it belonged to a cunning yellow Veretian and a man who thought of her not at all.)

(In the window that overlooked the sea, she had planted marigolds.)

Torveld looked up. He had a face inclined to kindness, but for the time being it had been overtaken by wariness instead. “You have asked an audience of me. I have granted it. What is it that you wish to ask of me?”

“I know that one,” hissed Nicaise into Jokaste’s ear (he had to stand on his tiptoes to reach it). “The slave. He’s Urus—Eran—Erasmus. He came with Damen to Arles. He’s a limp fish. I poked him some, but it got boring.”

At the sound of Nicaise’s voice Erasmus noticed him and blanched, hiding behind Torveld. Whatever Nicaise had done to him had left a lasting impression. A feeling suspiciously close to pride fluttered in Jokaste’s chest. 

Prince Torveld was less receptive. “The Prince of Vere is my friend,” he said. _Unlikely, though you probably think so_ , thought Jokaste, recalling to mind a clever face, an intricately brutal tongue. People like that (like _them_ ) did not make friends. They made profitable acquaintances. “It does not please me to extend sanctuary to his enemies,” Torveld continued, stern. “If you have business here, other than baseless slander, I would have it now.” Half-hidden by the chair, he grasped Erasmus’ hand, and Erasmus quieted. Jokaste felt the pinch in her brow and smoothed it over.

“My Prince,” she said, modulating her tone to appear deferential, flattering, subtly sensuous. She sank into a curtsy in the Patran style, grace practiced to perfection. Nicaise made a grudging genuflection to her left. “I am saddened to hear that such tales of my reputation have spread so far. I promise you, I am here only to ensure the safety of that for which I love more than my life.” She paused, letting a ripple of sorrow across her expression. “My son.”

Torveld was still suspicious: he was not, unfortunately, an idiot. Still, he was a gentlehearted man, and she had caught his attention. “Your son?”

With an effort of will, Jokaste quelled the urge to wet her lips in nervousness. No; perhaps that would help her, in this case. She allowed it. “You may have heard of my…situation, when I was of late in Akielos.”  
  
“I have.” Torveld’s voice was as iron. Poor man, he probably thought it gave away nothing.

“I say to you now that I did not know of the plot to demean King Damianos so and take his country for him. I truly thought him murdered.” Jokaste let her eyes fill with tears. Only enough to threaten a few, glittering drops, not enough to redden her nose and affect her beauty. “I thought only of my child, and when he was taken from me, I realized the viper’s nest that had surrounded me.”  
  
“Enough,” said Torveld. “I know you trade in falsehoods. But your love for your child is the one sincere thing about you. You are fortunate that Patras is better at catching, and punishing, traitors than Akielos is. I anticipated this.” He gestured with a hand over his shoulder. A door opened behind him, and Jokaste felt Nicaise tense beside her as her own pulse sped. If this had been another miscalculation—if now they were to be brought to their deaths, after traveling so far—  
  
A woman stepped through the door, holding a bundle in her arms, and Jokaste

saw  
  
her _son_  
  
“He’s gotten so big,” she murmured. It was the only coherent thing she could manage. She ached for the loss of seeing each new millimetre of fat around his cheeks and his pudgy arms, every shaky movement that allowed him, now, to lift his head just enough to fix his eyes on her face. She was across the room. Her son was in her arms. He smelled exactly the way she remembered. Jokaste pressed her cheek to the top of his tiny baby head and rocked him against her.  
  
“I have no lost child to offer you,” Torveld was saying to Nicaise. “I cannot imagine a reason for you to be here, especially after how you have treated Erasmus. State your purpose.”  
  
Nicaise’s hands shook. He curled them into fists at his sides, “You knew what he was doing,” he said. His voice possessed the sharp, clear quality of shattered crystal. “You were in Vere. You were an outsider. He couldn’t have reached you, when you returned to Patras. You saw what was happening, and _you didn’t stop it._ ”

In the back corner of her mind, where she was not kissing every inch of her son’s face and counting his perfect fingers and toes to make sure they were all still there, Jokaste heard the hall go silent. The courtiers that had lingered around the edges of the railinged balconies above had frozen. Torveld was as stone in his simply-carved chair at the end of the carpet; his face was bloodless. Somebody dropped a book, and the pages battered each other on the way down. Erasmus sucked in a diminutive, shaking breath.  
  
“Your Highness,” said Erasmus.  
  
Jokaste stared. Nicaise stared. The whole hall stared. It was unthinkable. He was a slave. Yet he had spoken. In the audience hall. During an audience. _Out loud._  
  
“Your Highness,” repeated Erasmus. He knelt and kissed Torveld’s foot, and then his hand. Not only his breath was shaking now. His curls were honey, his complexion burnt sugar. Only fools worshipped the gods, anymore, but he looked every inch the son of divinity. “My Prince. Please. He’s younger than I am.” He spoke of himself in the first person, against the Akielon training he would have had. Was that the way of things, in Patras? Could a slave make demands of a prince?  
  
Torveld lifted his hand from under Erasmus’ lips and carded it through his hair with such tenderness that Jokaste almost had to look away. “He hurt you,” Torveld said, in a tone that outmatched the touch.  
  
“Please,” Erasmus said again.  
  
Torveld caressed Erasmus’s cheek, the underside of his jaw. Someone in the balconies coughed.  
  
“If it is your wish,” said Prince Torveld, “Then I will do for him what I can.” 

* * *

 “You should call him Stinky,” said Nicaise, as he and Jokaste were escorted to the rooms that had been granted them (Torveld did not want them let loose in his brother’s palace. Jokaste would work on that, though seduction was clearly out of the question. She had other talents). “For his most obvious feature.”  
  
Jokaste held her son closer. He _did_ need a change of diaper. The female slaves had always handled that part, in Akielos, but Jokaste couldn’t bear to let him out of her arms for a moment so she would have to learn how to perform the necessary duty. “In Akielos, the prerogative of naming goes to the father,” she said, amused.  
  
“I’m too young to be a father,” said Nicaise, recoiling in disgust. “And I don’t give a fuck about Akielos.” He extended a finger into the blankets, and Jokaste’s son enclosed it in a tiny fist. “You could also call him Drooly. Or Leaky. Or Hideous.”  
  
Jokaste’s son was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen, but she didn’t expect Nicaise to understand that. He was still, as he had said, too young.  
  
_In another life, he would have been a king_ , she had written on a scrap of paper left in a cage. Jokaste looked down at the baby in her arms, and across at Nicaise, chattering at the child with a never-ending stream of insults.She felt a smile sprout and grow.In another life. Perhaps it was not too late for this one, yet.

* * *

* * *

  _Marigolds:_ Princess Marigold was the daughter of King Midas, whom he turned to gold. Also in Greek mythology, there was a woman (Caltha) who fell in love with Apollo and was melted by his rays into a marigold. In bright bursts of oranges and yellows, marigolds are cheerful flowers that embolden any garden.

_Copper:_ In Greek mythology, copper is assigned to Aphrodite. It represents love, charisma, feminine beauty, and feminine youthfulness. It was the material used to make mirrors.

_Silver:_ in Hesiod’s Five Ages of Man, the Silver Age was the second. The men of the Silver age were inferior to those of the Gold Age and were killed by Zeus. Apollo and Artemis each possessed a silver bow. Silver is associated with the moon, and symbolizes clarity, focus, persistence, and strength.  
  
_Gold:_ Gold features prominently in Greek myth. The first, and best, of the Five Ages of Man was the Gold Age. The Goddess of Strife, Eris, provided a golden apple inscribed “To the Most Beautiful,” for Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite to fight over. Golden apples again feature in the story Atalanta and the footrace, where Aphrodite provided irresistible golden apples to her suitor to distract her so he could win the race and marry Atalanta. Before this, Atalanta was the only woman among the Argonauts on their quest for the Golden Fleece. Gold represents the sun, perfection, purity, and authority. It is the metal of Kings.

       And Queens.

 

**Author's Note:**

> I feel like after this Nicaise and Jokaste have a relationship where they each can pick at the other’s insecurities and it’s cool because it’s them? Post-traumatic road trips are weird.
> 
> What Nicaise did to Erasmus was extremely cruel but Jokaste doesn’t know that; she just knows that her boy got one up on that other guy. Also, Jokaste…has got no problem with collateral. ~~I love u bby ur doing amazing~~ Erasmus is a dear and is also one of the strongest people in the series, and eventually Jokaste realizes that.
> 
> Re: Nicaise to Torveld, even if Nicaise doesn’t completely understand he was the Regent’s victim, he’s starting to, and that was a big moment for him. (Nicaise has also noticed how adults react to how the Regent treated him, and is always down for manipulation and spectacle; but there was a bit of honesty there that he’s not going to admit to easily.)
> 
> (Also, I’m sure pets wear shoes sometimes, like when they’re riding horses, Ancel, honey, please. But I always imagined that most of the time they didn’t?)
> 
> This piece is a bit of a different style than I usually go for, but I try to match the style of my writing to the narrator so I wanted to give it a shot *shrug emoji*
> 
> I’m not on tumblr much, but I did make a sideblog to post these fics, so if you want to shoot me an ask to chat I’m at [duckfresco](http://duckfresco.tumblr.com).


End file.
